Sorting My Mental Mess

I was telling a friend today about the thinking I'm working on. Questions of mediums, minds, history, choice, action.

The whole thing needs to be about a theory of action. A philosophy of action. I just want to understand why we do what we do. Why we do it the way we do. How we choose the things we do.

It is a big mess. A big web of ideas that I don't understand the connections.

But it made a bit of sense when I was telling my friend about it.

It was making sense when I was talking about Zizek on retroactive freedom. It becomes a more and more appealing idea. Especially when I am able to explain it with Collingwood's definition of the imagination. I think that it helps.

Who knows.

But I'm sorting thoughts. Maybe I'll be able to write soonish.

Maybe this or that.

Theory Of Choice

A lot of my recent posts have been revolving around this idea of a theory of choice. Choice seems like such a central concept. One that we assume is valid and real. But one we don't always define precisely. I want to be able to define choice in some meaningful way.

I was thinking about the American dream. The idea of entrepreneurship. The idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I think it is a crock.

I think choice needs to be conceptualized in very different ways.

I think that Badiou's notion of the atonal world has a part to play in it.

I think Zizek's notion of retroactive freedom has a lot to do with it.

I am too tired to really write about this.

But this is the issue I am finding myself drawn towards.

The issue of action.

The issue of choice.

Really, we can just do things.

Maybe I should spend more time just doing things and less time thinking about how to do them.

Because they are in some ways incompatible.

Not entirely. Habit is a great example of how thought and action can be intertwined and made compatible.

But god dammit I spend too much time thinking.

What bull shit.

I need to do more things. I need to walk more. Go more places.

Fuck.

Violence Violence Violence. War War War.

Tonight I went out with a friend and his brother.

I had never met his brother before.

But his brother was a member of ROTC.

I really enjoyed talking with him. I thought he was a really thoughtful person. I felt like he had a lot of views that I wanted military members to have. He supported things like racial and sexual equality. He was very with it.

But talking to him reminded me more than ever of my interest in the military. My interest in war. My interest in violence.

Perhaps I'll share an anecdote to make this clearer. I have been getting to know a friend recently (shout of to j-dawg). Me and him share an interest in Zen and Buddhism. We were chatting one night and he told me about something he was reading. He said that certain people believe that in order to understand our own lives we need to understand the entire cosmos. That knowledge needs to be total, from the individual mind to the nature of the entire universe.

And my immediate reaction is, WHAT?!

Cosmic understanding WHAT?!

You want me to understand the entire cosmos?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Shall I flip out now or later?

The only option is to flip out now.

Because that notion conflicts with my deepest assumptions.

Today I told a coworker that it was fascinating to make assumptions explicit. When you take something that you have assumed, that has existed on an implicit level, and you make it explicit, things change. Suddenly things are raised to a higher level of consciousness. You are aware of yourself in ways that you weren't before.

And in that moment with J-dawg one of my assumptions was made explicit.

I assume that the highest reality (intellectually, analytically) is the political and social world.

The thing that I must analyze is the political and social world.

To ponder the cosmos is quite serious, but for some reason, feels inadequate or silly.

The world that needs to be contemplated is the political world.

And I don't mean to imply that there is a complete disconnect between the cosmic and the political world. That is one reason that I want to revisit John Searle's chapter 'Language as Biological and Social' in Making The Social World. Because there is undoubtedly a relationship between the natural (cosmic) world and the social and historical world.

But can violence, war, and politics be explained by references to the cosmic world?

I don't know.

But I need to pursue military history.

I am very upset.

I don't know how to continue to think about violence and war.

I think that Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point might be a good book for me to turn to.

I hope I read it.

I hope you love me.

I hope I love you.

Theory Of Choice and Philosophy Of History

The next section of my essay 'Relationships and Mediums' is supposed to be on the philosophy of history. But for some reason I can't bring myself to write about it. What kind of questions am I trying to answer by writing about history? What am I trying to get at?

And I think what I am really trying to get at is a theory or philosophy of choice. I want to know what it means to choose something, what it means to be free. And more specifically, what it means to choose something based on historical knowledge.

Part of it has to do with Zizek's work on the philosophy of The Act. His notion of retroactive freedom is a big part of it. I think a lot of what is going on with Zizek requires a more developed philosophy of history to really make sense.

I'm not really reading much right now except Naked Lunch. I'm not really writing a lot right now. I'm confused and sort of ruminating on my life and other things. Don't feel the need to really push myself to read.

I'm thinking about revisiting some books. Namely Decoding Clausewitz and Making The Social World. They are important books for me that I haven't studied enough yet.

Oh well.

I'll get back to this issue of choice and philosophy of history at some point. Foucault On Freedom will be a valuable book for thinking about that stuff, too.

Military History And Choice

I think a lot of my writing has to do with choice and freedom. These are issues that really confuse me. They are often spoken of casually. Sometimes they seem to be obvious or self-evident concepts. But I don't know. They confuse me.

Then I was walking home and I was thinking about my education. I was thinking about my background in military history. And how perhaps the most important thing I learned was to think about complex decision making. I was reading Clausewitz and I was forced to think about the way that decisions are made. How do people make complex and difficult decisions? An interesting question. And one that eventually collapses into the need for a theory of choice.

And a cursory glance at the internet shows that there are already theories of choice in existence. Duh. Of course people have already theorized about choice. I'll have to catch up on that literature.

Rational choice theory is one theory of choice that I have a problem with. It was originally developed by political scientists. It is a method of studying history and political decision making. Its fundamental assumption is that all political actors are rational actions, and can therefore be explained. Reading Clausewitz immediately problematizes this idea.

Clausewitz believes that political decision is far too complex and rapid to allow the time required for ratiocination. Instead, political leaders need to rely on intuition: on the ability to quickly make and communicate complex decisions with limited and uncertain information.

Anyways, I think that I need to focus more explicitly on the issue of choice. That is what my undergraduate education really forces me to reflect on.

I think I should reflect more on Clausewitz.

And more particularly, I think I should try to articulate the relationship between habit and intuition. Intuition is something I learned about quite a while ago and really have read and thought about. A bit, but of course not enough. Habit, however, is a newer idea for me. It is one I have also thought about for a while, albeit in different terms. So perhaps that would be a good thing to write about.

I also wanted to write a short piece on the idea of history as the history of thought.

Maybe all of this should just be subsumed in the next section of my essay on mediums.

Also, someone told me at work today that I need to just lose myself in fiction. And I think they are right. Maybe.

I just love nonfiction so much.

Theory of Mind and Human Self-Creation

I have a whole lot of thoughts that I'm struggling to sort.

The main thing on my mind is theory of mind.

What is the mind? How does it work?

The American philosophy I have read primarily addresses the second question.

There are two main answers.

1. The mind works by internally simulating the thoughts of other people from the evidence available to them. I.E. The mind works through empathy and extended forms of empathy. We reconstruct other people's thoughts in our own minds through their expressions, gestures, and words.

2. The mind works by drawing on tacit psychological theories. We are all naive psychologists that make inferences about other people's behavior. We are all use a process that is intuitive but if made explicit resembles the deductive logic used by scientists.

This is a fascinating divide. How could these two properties exist in the same mind? Well, it seems to me that both of these mental properties could easily exist within the human mind. We have mirror neurons, we have the capacity for empathy. But we also have language and the ability to generalize. We have the ability to label people and to make generalizations about other people. Language is such a fucking bitch. It is so confusing. It blurs the line between natural and constructed in the weirdest god damn ways.

So, my problem: I am convinced that both of these things are natural properties of the human mind. We are capable of empathizing. We are capable of generalizing and labeling. So what to do? What the fuck are we going to do?

Because, frankly, I think labeling is really fucking dangerous. To be comfortable with labels is to be lost. To think that your categories are accurate is to be fooled. And sure, I am hyperbolizing here. No doubt. But still, I think that we are way too comfortable with out labels. They rationalize inequality and disengaged behavior.

I think the solution to this problem lies in the notion of human self-creation. Because the truth is we can't accept our labels as facts. Instead, we need to embrace a certain epistemological view advanced by Ian Hacking, Roger Smith and Foucault: we need to accept that our nature is constituted primarily by what we say we are. We need to understand that human knowledge is reflexive. That we become what we say we are. That we create ourselves through the narratives that we construct about ourselves.

This is a way to temper the divide between theory-theory and simulation theory. We need to see that our empathy (simulation) is always grounded in a world of abstract (theoretical) concepts. And that by modifying our personal narratives we will be modifying the theory of ourselves, and thus modifying the way that we empathize with others.

In short, if we are willing to rethinking the ways that we conceptualize ourselves and others we will be able to revolutionize the way that we empathize with ourselves and others. If we take the time to create ourselves through narratives then we will be able to empathize with ourselves in new ways.

I have been drinking and all of this is unclear. But there is something very serious happening with these ideas. Simulation theory, theory-theory, and the notion of reflexivity have huge implications.

I am freaking out.

My mind is sorting.

And I will fucking sort.

I swear. I really do.

I'll figure something out someday.

Jesus.

I cannot express my emotions intensely enough.

Philosophy makes me insane.

Work makes me insane.

I am so emotional and so full of thoughts.

My mind goes through such strange fits of twirling and moving,

Why is philosophy taken so lightly?

Shall I flip out more?

Externalization. Restless, Autonomous Externalization.

August has officially begun and I am unofficially restless.

Being in Maine seeing my family was a really nice time. I enjoyed seeing everyone. And my first two days back in Seattle have been super nice and filled with friends and nice weather and lots of fun.

But my life has been on hiatus for a week and now I'm back in the thick of it without being in the thickest of it.

Tomorrow (today) I'll be going back to work. Work is fun for me. But I'm not sure how I'm feeling about it these days. Work is such a weird part of life and I don't know what to do with myself.

And I don't know exactly what to do about my reading and writing. Which is the normal thing it seems. But right now I'm in a weird spot where I have an outline, sorta, and a bunch of stuff I could write about. But I feel more inclined to wait and keep reading. I just don't know what to read.

I was trying to read Deleuze's Difference & Repetition but the first 40 pages felt so impossible and I'm not sure if I can really push my way through it or not. So difficult. It amazes me sometimes how difficult a book can be. And jesus this book is one of those books.

I started looking at a volume of essays called The Humanities And The Dynamics Of Inclusion Since World War II. Should be good to look at. It is pretty important that I understand the state of the humanities before I commit to graduate school and get all wrapped up in that world. Just started reading the intro. I'll finish the intro and maybe test the waters with 1 of the essays.

I was thinking about this blog. Sometimes it just seems so odd to me. Like what is going on here. Why am I doing this? What is all this writing about? Why am I putting it on the internet?

And it occurred to me that even though this blog is very public (in theory), I feel very disconnected from it. This blog is autonomous or something. It is autonomous from me. Separate from me. Maybe autonomous isn't the best word to use. I'm not sure what word to use.

But when I externalize things, when I make words and I put them on the internet, I don't always feels super connected to them. I wonder about them and their relationship to me and my life. Because sometimes I don't feel like a writer. I feel like a lot of other things. I might not be a writer (even though I have done quite a lot of writing). I'm not sure what I am.

But there is something weird about this blog, something weird about writing, something weird about my sense of identity.

Honestly, I feel that my identity is solidified a lot more in my relationships with other people than it is by my writing. My writing is definitely an important part of my identity. But I have a better sense of myself from my relationships with other people. That is the real me, I think. But the writing is me too.

One interesting thing is how my writing effects my relationships. Because it definitely does. In my more philosophical writing I am typically addressing some sort of issue that has implications for the (my) social world. I'm usually writing about things like small talk, expression, minds, empathy, emotions, language, and so on. All of that writing then effects how I engage with people in the real world.

So it is an interesting question about this blog, its autonomy, its relationship to my social life.

Who knows.

All I know is that things are going to be fine. But that I'm restless right now.

I'm restless for the journey ahead.

Which means that I'm uncomfortable with waiting.

Which is something I don't like.

Waiting is important. And I'd like to be better at it.

Who knows. I want to get to my writing at some point.

I'm working on problems that roughly fall into the category of philosophy of history.

Wonderful.